New APPS

For my graduate seminar on attention last night we read papers outside my usual range of expertise, on the intersection of attention and culture. We read Nisbett et al.’s Culture and Systems of Thought and Hedden et al.’s Cultural Influences on the Neural Substrates of Attentional Control. Both are fascinating and worth a read. But the Nisbett et al. article, in particular, is full of ideas that may be interesting to readers of New APPS. Here are some of what I found to be salient points:

• The article maintains that different cultural groups have different, opposed styles of argument. Specifically, “Westerners” are committed to avoiding the appearance of contradiction as part of an analytic style of argumentation, but “East Asians” embrace contradiction as part of “naive dialecticism.” They give an example of one study that tests this claim:

“Peng and Nisbett…gave Chinese and American participants, all of whom were graduate students in the natural sciences, two different types of arguments for each of two different propositions and asked them to indicate which argument they preferred. In each case, one of the arguments was a logical one involving contradiction and one was a dialectical one. Thus, in one problem, two arguments for the existence of God were pitted against one another. One was a variant of the so-called “cosmological” or “first cause” argument. It holds that because everything must have a cause, this creates an infinite regression of cause and effect unless there is a primary cause by an infinite being. The dialectical argument applied the principle of holism, stating that when two people see the same object, such as a cup, from different perspectives, one person sees some aspects of the cup, and the other sees other aspects. But there must be a God above all individual perspectives who sees the truth about the object. Americans preferred the argument based on noncontradiction in eachcase, and Chinese preferred the dialectic one.” (302)

• Moreover, these different cultural groups attend to scenes in different ways. East Asians attend to a “wider range of objects” than Americans. The authors conclude, “Thus the attention of East Asians appears to be directed more toward the field as a whole and that of Americans more toward the object. East Asians found it easier to see relationships in the environment but found more difficulty in separating object from field.” (298)
• One explanation for the many differences discussed in the paper is that “Western” culture is more individualistic, and “East Asian” culture is more collectivist. The authors discuss the possibility that differences in social interest could lead to within-culture variations of the same type: “Americans who are more interested in social activities and in dealing with other people are more field dependent (even when intelligence is controlled) than are people with less social interest.” (303) 
• And this difference in emphasis, on focused, analytic style thinking versus contextualized, holistic style thinking, leads to different benefits, according to the authors. Take the example of advancements in mathematics in Ancient Greece and China: “It has been argued that the lack of interest in logic accounts for why, although Chinese advances in algebra and arithmetic were substantial, the Chinese made little progress in geometry where proofs rely on formal logic, especially the notion of contradiction” and “Importantly, there never developed in Greece the critical concept of zero, which is needed for an Arabic-style place number system as well as for algebra. Zero was rejected as an impossibility on the grounds that nonbeing is logically self-contradictory (Logan, p. 115)!” (294)

You can see even from these few points that the article is remarkably wide-ranging in its analysis. I do not mean to justify the claims that the authors make, but to point out that these claims could well have implications for how we understand philosophy and what counts as good reasoning. Well worth a read!